Meynell's Short Lyric On War

I finally tracked down a used copy of The Poems of Alice Meynell, published in a nice clothbound edition in 1955. For a bibliophile, the arrival of a new used-book by post brightens the day. To re-introduce gloom, I'll reprint a short lyric about war from the volume. Meynell decided to use a quotation from Richard Hooker as the title--and to give the attribution in the title, so the poem is indeed called "'Lord, I owe Thee a Death': Richard Hooker," and it includes the epigraph, "In Time of War." The war in question is the Great War, which we know as World War I, the horror of which Europe had not seen before, even though it had seen plenty of wars.



"'Lord, I owe Thee a Death': Richard Hooker"

In Time of War

Man pays that debt with new munificence,

Not piecemeal now, not slowly, by the old:

Not grudgingly, by the effaced thin pence,

But greatly and in gold.

--Alice Meynell

The extreme understatement of this poem works effectively, at least for me. Instead of expressing horror at the scale of life lost in the Great War, Meynell frames the loss of life in terms of a monetary debt, and in so doing she mimicks the heartless, matter-of-fact way in which nations sent soldiers to slaughter in the trenches. Meynell punctures that cold, deliberate, ironic trivializaton of death in the last line, however, because "greatly and in gold" reminds us that, whatever terms by which one chooses to frame the loss of life, one cannot successfully minimize how dear the cost has been. The short lyric seems to imply that even if one chooses to rationalize the loss of life as inevitable (everyone has to die sometime), the rationalization will dissolve because inevitable though the debt may be, God is not the one who decided it should be paid, in effect, all at once--"greatly"--and in gold: a massive percentage of young men from a certain generation in Europe and elsewhere. A similar debt is now being paid by Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans--greatly, and in gold.